Nights in Rough Neon
by Humbuggy
Summary: To the detached observer, the street contains a strange oddity. He saunters armoured in nothing but a hoodie and is too young, perhaps, to walk so proudly unafraid. Or: Everything is (kind of) okay and everything hurts.


Tadashi never managed to drag his little brother to 'The Nerd Lab' and can do nothing as his brother wanders the night and gets deeper and deeper into the bot-fighting underworld.

Or: Everything is (kind of) okay and everything hurts.

Written because I am STILL not over Tadashi and all my feels. I kinda started scribbling this down on my drag shift and decided to stick it up. Ultimately directionless and contains too much present tense. I will take Hiro &amp; Tadashi Brotherhood 5Ever to the grave.

* * *

To the detached observer, the street contains a strange oddity.

A shadow formed from neon and flickering street signs, pools around the slim figure. He saunters armoured in nothing but a hoodie and is too young, perhaps, to walk so proudly unafraid. A ratty black bag 'borrowed' off his older brother slouches off one shoulder. One hand in shoved into his hoodie's pocket, while the other swings loose at his side.

It is two am in the seediest part of San Fransokyo and Hiro Hamada walks alone. Alone that is, except for the roiling black mass in his hoodie pocket, curling in a cool metal caress around his left hand.

People with more sense know that walking around this area alone is asking for trouble, but Hiro doesn't care, has a reckless edge to his teeth and cool $900 sitting in his bag from tonight's bot fight. Bets, not hustling. His face is too well known for his 'new kid' act to pass muster on all but the uninitiated. Now, he simply doesn't bother.

He walks the long lonely road home, ducking through back alley's and past thumping night clubs. At one neon light club he stops to banter with two cheerfully drunk university students. They let him take a drag or two of their menthol cigarettes, cool nicotine rolls held loose between fingers. Icy heat sears his lungs. When he breathes out, the air clouds into a halo of thick white smoke. They fist bump cheery goodbyes and sight of the pair, arms flung over each other as they pass the cigarette between them, is lost from Hiro's view as a noisy group spills out onto the street. Glowering darkly, a burly bouncer eyes Hiro suspiciously. Shooting the formidable woman a blinding smile, Hiro ducks down a side street to avoid her stare.

As expected, the Lucky Cat Café is dark in all windows save one. Tadashi's pale face blinks in and out of view in the top garret window, a small watching figure as Hiro walks the calf-burning hill to home.

The back door clicks open quietly. Hiro's careful oiling of the joints does its job once again: soundless movement for a wayward youth. After quietly climbing the stairs to his shared room, Tadashi is a waiting up for him. The sliding divider of their room is open so that the thing what greet Hiro as he walks in, is Tadashi's weary worried smile stretched in a wane half moon. Lit by anxious blue-yellow light from laptop and desk lamp, Hiro has zero allusions that Tadashi has been studying. The low rumble of a motorbike echo's faint in the distance and Hiro knows that Tadashi has been sitting by the window and fidgeting. Before he would've been out on his scooter to get Hiro from whatever trouble his little brother had managed to find, but a year of unrepentant botfighting has stopped that and now he simply worries.

Hiro shucks his shoes and socks, peels rolls of money out of his bag and sticks his fighting bot on his work desk ready for repairs. He proceeds to wriggle out of his shirt and pants, ducking over for a second to ruffle his hair in guise so that the thin electronic band can slide unobtrusively from his thick mop into his hands and then under the bed. If it was an attempt to get Tadashi's uncomfortably steady gaze from off his back, it is unsuccessful. Hiro can still feel it even as he leans under the bed to stick his ill-gotten gains in the lock box welded to the metal legs of his bed. (Paranoid? Yes. Sensible? Also yes. No house thief is going to be hauling that box away in a hurry.)

"Good night?" Tadashi's voice is soft in the middle through its edge of brotherly condemnation.

Shrugging, Hiro replies, "Eh. No fist fights, and I snagged three hundred off a hot head Out-of-Towner with no sense and an ego. So yeah." He shoots a cheeky grin over his shoulder. "You want to borrow some lunch money? I can cover."

It is a tweak of the proverbial tiger's tail and Hiro can see the lecture clouding in Tadashi's knitted eyebrows.

He bites his lip, shuffling his feet a little in contrition before he can stop himself. (Some part of him will always be six years old and always after his brothers beaming approval.)

Rushing out in a sigh, Tadashi lets his incoming lecture drop, tiredness and something else drooping at his shoulders.

"As long as you're okay." He says instead.

Hiro smiles as reassuringly as he knows how, thinking of the microbots in his hoodie. "Safer than houses. I can handles myself out there."

"I know." Tadashi pads forward and pulls Hiro into a hug. Not a squeezing joke noogie hug, but a proper hug with two arms and a body bent to purpose just to say 'I love you and I need you to know that too'. Hiro melts into it; sinks into the warm cardigan covered chest to hear the sure steady heartbeat, squeezing skinny teen arms around his brother's back that has always carried Hiro without wavering.

"I just wish that you'd do something with that brain of yours." Tadashi says softly into Hiro's hair, it's just on the edge of hearing, and Hiro sighs out, lets the comments that pile behind his lips die in silence and allows his brother to have his concern. It is too late to fight, and honestly, he doesn't think that his brother can truly understand the gleeful adrenaline that goes through his veins, the heady rush of power after win and the nodding respect from both spectators and botfighters alike.

He tried once, but Tadashi has always been a better person than him, will always bent towards helping people, to thinking of the good of others. Hiro – Hiro is not like his brother in that respect, and he's come to eventually make his peace with it.

Instead he lets this small moment live and breathe its short quiet life until he steps back, sliding away from the embrace.

"Alright nerd. I'm going to bed." He says and, Tadashi steps back obligingly. Tadashi ruffles Hiro's hair and grinning softly at Hiro's whine of complaint as he slides the privacy screen close

There is a shifting rustling of clothes and bedding and both brothers start their small bed rituals, the pale moon flooding the room in shadows as Tadashi clicks off the lamp light.

"Night Hiro." Tadashi calls softly, cocooning himself in blankets for sleep that will not come as he worries (worries, always worries) about his younger brother, and the distance that has begun almost imperceptibly edging its way in. He rolls over, and listens to his younger brother fall asleep. This was, he is sure, not how it is (was) supposed to go; but he's tried everything and eventually has just let Hiro wander as he will.

Tomorrow night, the cycle will repeat; Tadashi worrying until early morning as Hiro saunters the streets, a dangerous confidence in his walk as he mingles in circles a fifteen year old should not know.

* * *

Because This is a ONEshot, there will be no more.

But what happens to Hiro after this? Well Tadashi continues his path to the light uninterrupted by death or explosions, and helps the world with Baymax. Hiro gets deeper and deeper into the illegal bot-fighting ring, eventually becoming this semi-mythological bot-fighter who's name is passed in hushed undertones and urban legends. Mostly its because he's totally unbeatable in the ring, and has some kind of power that makes even the triads respect him. (See Microbots.) Eventually he pulls himself out of the bot-fighting ring, creates a whole new sport of life sized robot fighting (See Real Steel vis a vis what the sport would be like) and then sells his microbots to pay the triads off trying to kill him.

They remain brothers, albeit distant and strange, and Tadashi doesn't die. Everything is okay and it still hurts.

Anyway. Send reviews, they seriously make my week.


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